Security management within modern networks can include assigning and enforcing security policies against devices in the network. Enforcing security policies can include or be preceded by the identification of devices on the network. Address sweeping and ping sweeping have been used to discover network devices. Such techniques include human users manually configuring one or more ranges of network addresses, such as internet protocol (“IP”) addresses, and then asking the software to “sweep” or “probe” every address in the specified ranges in an effort to find live devices. Such a sweep can produce results indicating whether a particular address is in use, implying the presence of a network device at that address. In networks employing internet protocol version 4 (“IPv4”) addressing, such brute force scanning can be used to scan each address in a broad range of addresses (including all possible IPv4 addresses) in a reasonable amount of time.
Like reference numbers and designations in the various drawings indicate like elements.